Stewart Brand, at the first hackers conference in 1984, famously said: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and…

Many of the most popular websites in the world offer a free service, yet are hugely profitable. Free search from Google; free messaging with MXit; free news from Mail & Guardian Online, even free photocopies! Most people who use them haven’t even considered how these ventures might make money. In fact, if you consider the…

The idea of authentic co-creation is quite obviously the most important shift that is happening in marketing and strategy today. It is a move away from centralised control of communications and branding to a more decentralised, user-oriented approach. At the iCommons Innovation Series last week in Jo’burg, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales stated that any business…

As the amount of new information produced in the world every day escalates, so I find my attention span decreasing in equal and opposite proportion. As more people in South Africa start publishing their own media online — on Facebook, blogs, videos and podcasts — so my choices about what to pay attention to become…

Estate Agency has been referred to as a “walled garden“, in other words an industry that is criticized as being based on asynchronous information between the agent and the buyers/sellers. Making money by getting in the way.